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in Louisville that was founded in 1879.
He and Paul first met in January, 2011,
shortly after Paul was sworn in as a sen-
ator, at a Martin Luther King Day cel-
ebration at Simmons. They became
friends, and Cosby invited him to speak
to students at Simmons in 2013.
Cosby’s relationship with Paul has
caused some concern among his parish-
ioners and Simmons students.“I have to
keep telling them that just because Rea-
gan engaged Gorbachev does not mean
he endorsed Gorbachev, and just be-
cause Roosevelt engaged Stalin, and
Nixon had his kitchen talk with Khrush-
chev, does not mean that engagement is
endorsement,” he said.
In Presidential elections, the Re-
publican Party’s share of the African-
American vote has been declining,
from fifteen per cent in 1976 to six per
cent in 2012. Paul’s outreach is no
doubt partly influenced by his and his
father’s controversial record on civil
rights, but he has chosen a different
way to woo black leaders and black
voters. Republicans have generally tried
one of two approaches. One, best
demonstrated by the former congress-
man and 1996 Vice-Presidential can-
didate Jack Kemp, is to campaign in
black communities with a generic mes-
sage of free-market conservatism and
other traditional Republican values.
The message has often helped such
candidates get attention and praise
from the media but few African-Amer-
ican votes. Today, a candidate associ-
ated with this strategy is Paul Ryan,
whose anti-poverty agenda draws on
the ideas pushed by Kemp, for whom
he once worked. In the other approach,
Republican candidates have aligned
themselves with conservative black
leaders.
Neither strategy has been success-
ful. Cosby believes that both parties
were mistaken when they stopped
treating the African-American com-
munity as an interest group with a
specific policy agenda. Cosby blamed
Clinton and Obama for the shift, cit-
ing Tim Wise’s argument, in his 2010
book, “Colorblind,” that the past two
Democratic Presidents have adopted
a policy of “post-racial liberalism.”
Cosby said, “The position is, what is
good for America is good for African-
Americans.” He described Obama as
“a post-racial liberal. He’s Michael
Jordan. He transcends race. He’s Tiger
Woods. He’s what Tim Wise calls ‘the
exceptional African American.’ ”
Cosby told Paul that Republicans
needed to understand black frustrations
with the Democratic Party. Although
Obama’s support is solid among Afri-
can-Americans, Hillary Clinton might
be vulnerable to a Republican attack.
“Michelle Alexander, in her book ‘The
New Jim Crow,’ says that no one helped
build up the prison industrial complex
any greater than Bill Clinton,” Cosby
told me. “Reagan started it, but Bill
Clinton put it on steroids.” He added,
sarcastically, “And he’s the first black
President.”
Cosby, who does not endorse candi-
dates, explained all this to Paul, and told
him that he needs to think of the black
community in terms of a detailed list of
concerns to be addressed, the same way
that politicians approach the L.G.B.T.
community or female voters. Most Re-
publicans have been even less inclined
than Democrats to talk about policy
in racial terms, while simultaneously
promoting some ideas, like voter-iden-
tification laws, that alienate the black
community.
Paul has taken Cosby’s advice, al-
though his effort got off to an embar-
rassing start last year, when he spoke at
Howard University and was greeted
with mocking laughter after he asked
black students if they knew that the
N.A.A.C.P. had been founded by Re-
publicans. Nonetheless, Cosby said,
“He’s one of the few persons that I see
speaking to some specific issues that are
not general issues, as relates to the black
community.” In mid-August, after po-
lice in riot gear and armored trucks
confronted unarmed black protesters in
Ferguson, Missouri, Rand wrote an ar-
ticle decrying the militarization of the
police. “Given the racial disparities in
our criminal justice system,” he said, “it
is impossible for African-Americans
not to feel like their government is par-
ticularly targeting them.”
In July, after he left a meeting of Af-
rican-American leaders, Paul told me,
“I believe strongly that we have created
enormous social problems with gov-
ernment policy. They’ll tell you the
whole idea of how many people we’re
putting in jail is destroying communi-
ties. It’s taking away the fathers. It’s
preventing their employment when
they come back. It prevents contact
with their kids. It’s just one thing after
another. It’s all the overzealousness to
incarcerate people for nonviolent felo-
nies.” He added, “I’ve always felt like
the war on drugs was overly criminal-
ized and used overly harsh penalties,
but I never really spent enough time in
the African-American community to
know how devastating it is to their
community.”
I asked him what had changed. “I’ve
always been of the same opinion,” he
said. “But I’ve been in some way made
more aware that we can do something
about it.” He said that “The New Jim
Crow” had greatly influenced him. “It is
the biggest civil-rights problem of our
era,” Paul told me.
Cosby related a surprising conversa-
tion that he had with Paul not long ago
at Simmons: “He said that if he could he
would shut down a lot of these prisons,
and he specifically said that the money
saved from mass incarceration would be
re-channelled toward job training. Now,
I am one hundred per cent sure he said
that to me.” Cosby went on, “I was
blown away, because I’m thinking, This
doesn’t sound like libertarianism to me.
This sounds like big government. Lib-
ertarianism means redirecting money
back to the taxpayers. If he made a state-
ment like that publicly, and stood by it,
I don’t know where he will stand within
the Republican Party and the libertari-
ans, but that would shake things up in
the black community.” He repeated
Paul’s statement to me three times. “He
said the thousands and thousands of
African-Americans that have gone to
jail because of mandatory sentencing
should be released and the money saved
should go for a job-training program.
Whoa!”
Rand Paul has spent the past few
months often clumsily trying to
convince voters that his foreign pol-
icy differs from his father’s. Rand is
perhaps best known, thus far, for his
nearly thirteen-hour filibuster last year
to protest the Administration’s use of
drones—a tactic that further convinced
Republican hawks that he doesn’t share
their assessment of the risks posed by
terrorism. Over the summer, Paul was
under constant attack from rivals, such
as Governor Rick Perry, of Texas, who
described him as “curiously blind” to
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